Most of life is dealing with the consequences of your own actions. You make a choice and deal with the results. Sometimes they are good. Sometimes, not so good.

One of the hard lessons of existence, given the collective tendency to fuck up royally as the human race, is that it always pays to work with the pros. That’s because the amateurs don’t always know what they’re doing. That’s why they’re called amateurs. Not pros.

But I still trust some of my amateur friends for advice and guidance, at least to steer me in the general direction of doing something smart. And recently I was dealt a strange affliction known as cellulitis. It is an infection caused when staph germs get under your skin.

Cellulitis is just as bad as those situations when a co-worker gets under your skin. You know what that’s like. Dealing with a nasty co-worker builds dread of going to work each day because that aggressive asshole, whatever gender, is about to ruin your day.

I’ve had more than my share of dealing with nasty co-workers as well as some strange afflictions and affections. I once contracted a sliver that almost caused me to lose a finger. That was a ton of fun, a knock-me-out surgery and three weeks of intravenous antibiotics. And my finger is still slightly bent even after weeks of hand therapy. So I have learned not to mess around with infections of any kind.

So when I sensed something funky brewing in the back of my hand, I went to the Urgent Care Center. They took a look at the hand and prescribed powerful antibiotics to knock out the infection. This is a bit like pushing your annoying co-worker off the sixth story of your building. But let’s not tell anyone about that.

Because that would be a quick fix to the annoying co-worker problem. Cellulitis takes a bit longer to depose. In fact, I took antibiotics for three full weeks. Twice a day. Big ass horse pills. The infection subsided. Got reduced to a twinge. And finally, disappeared. And that’s what antibiotics can do. They kill bad germs.

But there’s one problem with antibiotics. They can also kill the good germs that help your body in important ways. We truly need the bacteria in our gut, to properly digest food and maintain a healthy bowel. If you kill off that bacteria, things get funky in a hurry.

That’s exactly what happened to my lower gastrointestinal tract. The antibiotics killed off the good germs in my lower-whatever and everything got loose and messy.

Now you may recall that we already discussed the fact that working with the pros is always important. But I do know some people who know a lot about this gut problem stuff, and asked them on Facebook if they knew how to handle a loosey-goosey gut. They all told me to take some probiotics. And some protein, perhaps, because it has the word “pro” in it.

Which is very different, you might say, from the amateur biotics. Those are pills that don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Rather than wind up in your gut, they’re likely to take a detour to your liver, and confuse the hell out of that organ. But as it turns out, the liver does help with digestion. Here’s what the Internets says about that, in short (grammar as it was posted): “In the human it is located in the upper right quadrant of the abdomen, below the diaphragm. The liver has a wide range of functions, including detoxification of various metabolites, protein synthesis, and the production of biochemicals necessary for digestion.”

Holy shit! Who knew? Well, it turns out you actually can find out some interesting stuff when working with amateurs. Like how vaccines cause autism, and how the human race never landed on the moon. Wait, those are the work of amateurs…

My other fear was that taking amateur biotics would let them head for my brain instead of my ass. That might produce some strange and dangerous thoughts, like the idea that it would be a good idea to elect Donald Trump as President, or that going into Iraq was a good idea even though George Bush the First called George Bush the Second and told him, “This is a very bad idea.” But what did George Bush the Second do? He impetuously slammed the phone down and went ahead with that shitty plan to invade a country full of people who already hate us, and the countries around them too. Nice job, Georgie Boy. Now we have ISIS to deal with. Which proves that terrible ideas often lead to terrorism of an entirely different level.

So I did not want any amateur biotics in my system. So I called the actual doctor (a pro, you see) and made an appointment. He listened to my story and read the information on his computer sent to him from Urgent Care. That’s how modern medicine works these days. You can’t go anywhere without a doctor knowing what you’re doing.

I was waiting for my doc to ask if I’d replenished my I-Pass when he brought up the topic of a condition called C-Diff. I’d already heard that term from a veterinarian friend of mine that weighed in on the subject on Facebook. We’re all just animals in the end, you see. C-Diff, he told me, is when your gut bacteria is out of balance and your shit turns to brown water.

And my actual doctor wanted to know something important about my shit. “Does it stink?” he asked. And I had to chuckle inside. “No, I’m a liberal,” I wanted to say. “My shit doesn’t stink.”

But they sent me home with a plastic pan in which to shit, and I did that with rubber gloves covering my hands so that I could avoid contact with all those bad germs messing with my innards.

My doc told me to start taking probiotics right away. So I called up a friend that evening who sells probiotics, so she’s a pro of sorts. And the doc said I should work with the pros. “Get some good probiotics,” he counseled.

And my friend sells Shaklee,and I think that company sponsors a pro sports arena somewhere. So she doled out a bag of little round pills encased in three layers of acid-proof coating, which protects the probiotics until they can get down into your gut and colon. That’s just like the wedge pro football players use on kickoff returns. So I knew I was headed in the right direction on this shit.

But if they work from the throat down, it rather makes you wonder why you don’t just shove them ten inches up your ass and call it a day. But that would be an amateur move, you see. Because unless you’re a pro at that kind of thing, life can get messy in a hurry.

That also makes me wonder about people like Howard Stern, who pretty much does nothing on his show but talk about anal with his guests. And he’s one of the richest guys on the talent side of media. Which also makes you realize the real assholes all work on the ownership side. And that, my friends, cleanly explains the success of Donald Trump, who though he’s full of shit has gotten a complete pass from the media until recently. See, this shit all fits together in the end.

But I hope the probiotics start working fast, because I have a Sprint Triathlon to do this weekend, and I’d rather avoid the scene in which I shit my wetsuit or crap on the bike or let loose a barrage down my legs while clipping along on the 5K run.

See, it really did have something to do with swimming, riding and running. You have to trust me on these things. Cause I’m a pro.

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About Christopher Cudworth

Christopher Cudworth is a content producer, writer and blogger with more than 25 years’ experience in B2B and B2C marketing, journalism, public relations and social media. Connect with Christopher on Twitter: @genesisfix07 and blogs at werunandride.com, therightkindofpride.com and genesisfix.wordpress.com
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You must trace ISIS to its source. That is the militant, extremist Islamic state that Bush declared the enemy after 9/11. And at that point, he also misdirected our attention from pursuing Taliban in Afghanistan to implying there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Are you with me so far? If so, then you must trace the behavior of America in that region once we invaded. We had no plans for transition. None. Cheney insisted the process would take a few weeks at most. And then our CIA and the Bush administration engaged in torturing prisoners in the very same jails used by Saddam Hussein to torture his people. This enraged the Muslim world, and affirmed that hatred in ways that were directly conceived to insult their religion. Forcing men to lie naked in piles, and humiliating innocent people. All while Bush proudly proclaimed that the enemy should “bring it on.” These actions fueled and inflamed the militant Islamic world. And what do we do? We blanket accuse all Muslims of the same mentality, further shaming those who live peacefully, and insulting both Sunni and Shiites, who both hate each other and can’t stand the idea of being lumped together as one. And by the time Bush finally limped out of office, tail between his furry legs, we’d spent between $2T and $5T, with billions lost on skids to warlords all over the Middle East. And that’s the situation handed to Obama. So don’t try to lecture me on what I do and don’t know about ISIS. They’re a direct response to all we’ve done there, and the unrest we created even between militant Islamic states. Bush’s own father indeed did call his son, begging him not to break Iraq. But his arrogant, stupid little sonny boy had to prove his manhood. And prove himself to that psychopath Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocons who plotted this entire venture for decades before they stole power in the 2000 election. This is our history. There is no denying the facts. You may choose to interpret them differently, and try to claim that I don’t know who the neocons really are, but you’re wrong. Read John Dean’s “Conservatives Without Conscience.” He served under Nixon and recognized the early stages of this madness in the Republican Party. Neocons have gone so extreme they aren’t even claimed by traditional conservatives. I’ve studied this far deeper and longer than anyone I’ve ever encountered. I’ve attended a conservative church for 25 years, and finally left because the beliefs being promulgated from the pulpit were so insane. Even that church finally brought in a new voice. Nice people can get drawn into very bad ways. That’s how I view so-called modern conservatism, and oxymoron yes, but so true it delights in its own pain. And that’s how we got Donald Trump. Do you care to explain it some other way? That would be entertaining reading. Because I’ve not yet seen a rational explanation from you for the likes of the insane rantings of Rush Limbaugh, a cancerous boils on the ass of America. Or Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, or Fox News. But it doesn’t stop there. It goes much deeper than that. A mass delusion that anachronism and constitutional originalism is somehow the solutions to a progressive, globalized and sophisticated world. Give me a break. Conservatives have no more answers than an 8th grade social studies class.